I spent the rest of the night at the discotheque. There were strobe lights, blasting salsa music, and so many people you could hardly move. But I didn’t care, I was in the stratosphere. The young people were my drunken bodyguards. The erroneous impression my more mature colleagues got of me could have been seen from a different point of view, which in the end was the same: vampirism. My false maturity could not be seen in any other way. But my vampirism is special, I think.
Vampirism is the key to my relationships with others, the only mechanism that allows me to interact. Of course, this is a metaphor. Vampires, as such, do not exist, they are merely a hook on which to hang all manner of shameful parasitisms that need metaphor to come to terms with themselves. The shape that metaphor takes in me is special, as I said. What I need — which I suck from the other — is neither money, nor security, nor admiration, nor, in professional terms, subject matter or stories. It is style. I have discovered that every human being, every living being in reality, in addition to everything he has to show for himself by way of material and spiritual possessions, has a style he uses to manage those possessions. And I have learned to detect it and appropriate it. Which has important consequences for my relationships, at least for those I have established since I turned forty: they are temporary, they begin and end, and they are quite fleeting, more and more fleeting as I become increasingly skilled at capturing another’s personal style. Any other kind of vampirism could lead to permanent relationships; for example, if I extracted money or attention from my victim, the other’s reserves would likely become infinite. Even if I were looking for stories, a single subject could supply me indefinitely. But not style. It has a mechanism that gets worn out in the interpersonal transfer. Once in action, I watch my victim quickly dry up, wilted and vacant, and I lose all interest. Then I move on to the next one.
I have now revealed the entire secret of my scientific activity. My famous clones are nothing more than the duplication of style cells. Which should lead me to question my appetite for styles. I think the answer resides in the mere necessity to persist. I have sought an outlet for this need through love, without any success, so far.
We were crowded together on a bench pushed against a wall; next to me, at moments talking to me, sat Nelly, one of my young Venezuelan friends, a graduate student in literature. I admired her and I had a tendency to feel toward her that rare kind of envy that crosses sexual barriers. She must have been twenty-one or twenty-two, but she was the embodiment of an ageless ideal. She was small and thin, her features were unusually pure, and she had enormous eyes and an aristocratic air. Her suit — wide pants and bustier — was made of brown satin; her perfect breasts were almost exposed; she wore very pointy Asian slippers on her feet. Her blond curly hair fell over her shoulders at an angle, covering one eye. Part of her charm lay in her incongruity. She was mulatto, perhaps also with some indigenous blood, but her face was French. Her hair color was recent, judging by the comments I heard from her friends; I had met her as a redhead, years before. One could never guess what she was thinking. In the discotheque she was calm, relaxed, a glass of rum in her hand, her beautiful eyes lost in contemplation. She seemed to be elsewhere. She spoke only when spoken to; when not, she allowed a peaceful, cozy silence to envelop her. She spoke in a whisper, but she articulated her words so well that I could understand her perfectly over the loud music.
“You are enchanting tonight, Nelly,” I told her, my tongue heavy with alcohol. “As usual, I should say. Or did I already say that? Every sentence I utter comes out twice, though that’s why I feel it twice as strongly, wrapped as it is in the deep truth of its meaning and its intention.”
For a moment she seemed not to have heard me, but that was her usual reaction. In that minuscule space between our two bodies, she turned toward me, like the statue of a goddess turning on the altar.
“I dressed up especially in your honor, César. Today is your day.”
“Thank you very much. I am enjoying it. But you are always elegant, it’s a part of you.”
“That’s kind of you to say so. You are good inside and out, César.” My face must have betrayed my puzzlement at the second statement, because I heard her add, “You are young and beautiful.”
The lights were very low, we were practically in the dark. Or rather, the beams and pulses of the colored lights allowed us to see what was going on but not reconstruct it in our minds. This is the astute discovery such night spots have made. Their lighting arrangements reproduce subjectivity thereby nullifying it, a process further assisted by the alcohol and the noise. From the depths of this nullification rose, golden and warm like a houri out of paradise, the beautiful Nelly. I slipped my arm around her waist and kissed her. Her lips had a strange flavor, which made me think of the taste of silk. We were so close, so nearly on top of each other, that every gesture we made required only minimal displacement — almost imperceptible.
“I am no longer young,” I told her. “Haven’t you noticed how much hair I’ve lost since my last visit?”
She looked at my hair and shook her head. I insisted with the obstinacy of a drunk. I told her that my imminent baldness terrified me. And it wasn’t just out of vanity; there was a very concrete reason. I told her that when I was young I shaved my head in a rapture of madness, then had a message tattooed on my scalp, which my hair then covered when it grew back. If I went bald and this inscription were revealed, it would be the end of the scant prestige I had managed to build up as a fragile defensive shield around me.
“Why? What does it say?” she asked, pretending for a moment that she believed me.
“I can only tell you that it is a declaration of belief in the existence of extraterrestrials.”
A violet light that swept fleetingly over her face showed me her serious smile.
That was why, I went on to explain, I spent a fortune on shampoos with capillary nutrients, and why, not trusting commercial products, I had dedicated my life to chemistry.
A while later, changing the subject, I asked about the ring she was wearing on her left hand. It was a fascinating piece of jewelry, shaped like a crown, with a blue stone whose facets seemed to have been set separately. She told me it was her graduation ring, one of the traditions of the university, though hers had a special feature: they had doubled hers in honor of her having earned two simultaneous degrees, as Professor of Literature and Professor of the Teaching of Literature; it was a fairly subtle distinction, but she seemed quite proud of this double achievement.
She left her silky hand between my paws corroded by the nucleic acid I work with. I lifted it to my eyes so I could examine the ring, which was truly a notable piece for its workmanship and clever design. Each time a ball of strobe light rolled over us, the blue stone lit up brilliantly, and through the two tiny chiseled windows I could see the crowd of young people dancing. The thin gold ribbon that twisted around the stone carried an inscription.